DataDirect Networks (DDN®) today announced new feature enhancements to its WOS® object storage platform that include increased data protection and multi-site connectivity options. With its newest capabilities, DDN WOS provides the lowest data protection overhead available in the market. It also delivers control for local-only rebuilds for higher uptime and lower performance impact of hardware failures, along with multi-site collaboration, distribution and disaster recovery that is faster and more efficient than public cloud solutions.

“The new digitized world demands infrastructure solutions that are extremely scalable and flexible in terms of delivery performance and connectivity models and that offer full data protection with a wide choice of user-selected protection methods,” said Amita Potnis, research manager in IDC’s Storage team. “With continual innovation in object storage technologies and features, DDN’s object storage platform is leading end users along this path of digitization.”

DDN’s newly released WOS data protection offering, Extended ObjectAssure™, expands customer choice of protection methods, resulting in the industry’s widest variety of data-protection options. WOS’s extremely low overhead expenses make the cost of object storage competitive with tape storage alternatives. It also enables faster rebuild times that lower the risk of data loss during a rebuild and eliminate or limit performance impacts from drive failures.

“Object storage is really coming into its own with surging adoption across key use cases like large active archives, multi-site collaboration, content distribution, disk backup and disaster recovery,” said Laura Shepard, senior director of product marketing for DDN. “The new WOS features give our customers the lowest data protection overhead option in the industry, which directly translates to big cost savings. For sites that need to move a lot of data quickly and reliably for collaboration or backup, the new S3 multi-site feature delivers sizeable numbers of large objects faster and more reliably than public cloud solutions.”

DDN’s suite of WOS object storage solutions includes WOS as software-only and several appliances that start as small as a few hundred TB. Key advantages of DDN’s WOS object storage platform include:

Highest object storage performance: DDN WOS delivers more than 1.25x the speed per node of competing commercial and open-source offerings, as proven by WOS customers in real-world applications.

Industry-leading availability advantages: In addition to today’s announced Extended ObjectAssure, DDN WOS has additional erasure coding and replication combinations that provide customers with the widest variety of data protection and availability choices. DDN WOS can be configured to rebuild failed drives within a single node, thus reducing rebuild time and risk of data loss. This unique capability is crucial as larger drive sizes are boosting rebuild times and challenging organizations’ abilities to meet line-of-business data availability SLAs.

Flexible and massively scalable: The simplicity of the WOS architecture allows organizations to start as small as a single WOS appliance in four standard rack units and scale in single-node increments. WOS can deliver up to a quarter-million drives in a solitary, shared namespace and provide a single view of files and objects, thus allowing it to provide high-performance storage for active archive and collaboration environments seamlessly.

DDN’s WOS has been powering object storage infrastructure for customers worldwide for more than eight years. New customers include Cold Springs Harbor, Van Andel and Children’s Mercy Hospital of Kansas City. In addition, the University of Edinburgh’s Parallel Computing Centre is evaluating DDN’s WOS object storage to support an infinitely scalable storage pool and to manage better what will become a large active archive of research data. As detailed in a recent case study, the goal of its deployment will be to offer a highly scalable, cost-effective alternative to file storage to the university’s industry users and Tier 3 HPC centers that are being established around the UK.

“We’re entering a period of huge innovation both in HPC and storage,” said Mark Parsons, director of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. “Companies like DDN, which continue to innovate, best allow us to support scientists and researchers across all kinds of businesses to harness the full potential of leading-edge technology and to accelerate life-changing discoveries.”

Availability

The new WOS data protection and connectivity features are available this quarter across DDN’s WOS solution suite.

Upcoming 2017 NAB Show

DDN will showcase its latest storage solutions and innovations for media and entertainment organizations, including WOS, at the upcoming 2017 NAB Show, April 22-27, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada, at DDN booth #SL8016. To schedule a meeting, click here.

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world’s leading big data storage supplier to data-intensive, global organizations. For more than 18 years, DDN has designed, developed, deployed and optimized systems, software and storage solutions that enable enterprises, service providers, universities and government agencies to generate more value and to accelerate time to insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud. Organizations leverage the power of DDN storage technology and the deep technical expertise of its team to capture, store, process, analyze, collaborate and distribute data, information and content at the largest scale in the most efficient, reliable and cost-effective manner. DDN customers include many of the world’s leading financial services firms and banks, healthcare and life science organizations, manufacturing and energy companies, government and research facilities, and web and cloud service providers. For more information, go to DDN.com or call 1-800-837-2298.